Campaign Organization Tutorial

2.2 Introduction

Hello, this is Brad Geddes, the author of Advance Google AdWords, the founder of Certified Knowledge, and a PPC Faculty Chair from Market Motive. In this video we're going to look at campaign organization, and ways of organizing the campaigns within your account based upon your target goals and what you're trying to accomplish.

2.3 What Creates a Conversion

And when we first look at campaign segmentation, we need to go back to the conversion, because that's what we're really trying to do is do segments to help us create our goals. So look at what makes a conversion. We have our inventory source. This could be Google AdWords, the Google Display Network, Bing ads, and so forth.
Then we have a refinement of that organization. This is often your location targeting options. It may be your targeting options from a display network standpoint, interest, and topics. A refinement can be based upon keywords. And match types, so forth. And this is where a lot of our organization's going to come from is the refinement stage, because most of your major settings for how ads are displayed are at the campaign level.
For we have to look at our ads and our offer as well. If we want different ads by region, we need it for campaigns by region. So we'll look at organizing on a geographic basis. And found the landing page. And so these items together are what create conversions.
So we need to look at how to organize our campaigns to make sure we're getting the most conversions and goals out of our account. If we really look at what Campaign Segmentation is about, number one is account goals. What do you want your account to accomplish? If you don't know the reason why you're marketing or what you want to accomplish, there's no way of knowing if you're getting there, if you're getting worse or better.
So we first have to look at our goals and then see how we segment based upon goals. Networks, so we should always keep display and search different. They should always be separated into different campaigns. Budgetary reasons. Sometimes you had different product lines or corporate departments or budgets by various reasons.
And if we want different budgets based upon certain goals or based upon certain networks, we need to do some segmentation on a budgetary reason. The ads themselves, so if we want different ads by region we need to do segmentation based upon the ads. Targeting options. So when we get into targeting options, this includes things like location, devices, ad scheduling.
And then of course our topics, interests, placements we really talked about in the display section. So when thinking about segmentation, it's about looking at these items and saying, how do we create campaigns based upon what we're trying to accomplish that fit into these overall targeting changes?

2.4 Goals and Budget

So first we really need to list out, what are our goals? We've talked about goal listing in earlier videos. But first we have to list out, what do we want to accomplish? And how much would that cost us? So our budgets are really important with campaigns. because every campaign has a particular daily budget.
And then you can share them, but in totality you want to make sure that all your campaigns and your shared budgets are not going over your total budget you're allocated to spend on a monthly basis. Now sometimes this becomes an issue, cause you're like, well we can sell every product in the world to everyone in the world.
That's usually not a good way to start. If you can sell everything, what you really need to start thinking of is what do you really want to sell the most? For instance, products usually have two aspects to them. You have accessories, and accessories are generally not really high margin items, and they don't lend themselves to cross-sells and up-sells very well.
You don't buy initially a headset, because you're going to buy a computer to use the headset with. Instead, you start with the product, the iPod and the headset's an upsell. A computer and a headset's an upsell. Start the higher margin items, higher total order values. First, and then once you've hit your budget on those items then you can move to items that have less crosssellent upsale opportunity.
Of course you can also look at your current sales and see what's my top selling items? If you're currently selling them, they're good items to advertise as well. And then, we look at our goals, we have to think about the buying funnel. Where do our goals fit in the buying funnel?
because we may do different segments, based upon how we reach users in the buying funnel areas. So then we need to go back to our goals. We thought about this and said, well, our goals in totality are higher than the budget we've been allocated. So our option is to lower some of our goals, or to get rid of some of our goals.
To look at the budget that we're allocated and we look at the goals we're trying to hit. Make sure it's possible for you to even hit all your goals based upon the budget you have been given. Now you're going to want to refine your goals as necessary, even doing like a quarter of the review.
Saying what are our current goals? Are we hitting them all? Are we not hitting them? And then should we change them? So should our goals be changed over time as the business changes, as different products come and go, as different departments are expanded. So once you've thought about all these items, we need to do is start designing the account.
And if you've got a small account, you don't need to go and create a whole spreadsheet on how your targeting is going to work. When you get larger accounts, you really want to first list out, here's my campaign, here's a purpose of that campaign, here's the campaign's budget, here's our network and how are we going to target it, where it's going to be targeted, the bid types we're maybe starting with and going to.
For instance we can't start with CPA. CPA bidding requires and then a number of conversions to use. So maybe we start with CPC but our goal is to get CPA. Our device type so forth. So that way if you list out your campaigns you can sum up your budgets and make sure you're within the budget you're allocated but now you have an idea of where your key would fit.
Your targeting options fit. So we need to look at then is when we design this campaigns. How should we segment and what should our campaign segments look like? So we can create simple spreadsheets that list out this information before we start doing all the hard work of creating the ad groups, the keywords, writing the ads and so forth.

2.5 Getting Started with Campaigns

So if you're first starting, start with just a search campaign. Display is a little more difficult for many people. For some companies, display converts much better, for others it's worse. Search though is a high intent marketing channel, because a user's actively looking for you. So a good place to start is just a search campaign.
You're bidding by a ROAS or a CPA target overall. And then when you're ready to expand into display, add your placement campaign, where you've done your research, you picked out specific placements you want your ads to run on. And then placement can be placements plus topics or placements plus keywords, doesn't have to be just individual placements.
And then start getting into display, seeing what ads and offers work. And then when you're ready to expand in your display advertising, you can add that exploratory campaign. You're looking at your placement data, you're blocking sites that aren't doing well for you. You're adding sites that are doing well through a placement campaign, and expand from there.
This is a good place for small and medium sized businesses to start. Although more often we do want to do more segmentation on the search campaigns or display campaigns based upon geographies and budget. So let's look at some other ways of doing campaign segmentation.

2.6 Geographic Campaigns

So when we think about doing segmentation on a geographic basis. The question really is, is, do you need more than one campaign? If you have different CPAs, or different conversion rates by region. You can use bid modifiers to automatically change your default bid by a region basis. Now there are times though we still want multiple campaigns even with bid modifiers.
So for instance, if we want different ads to show by region, we need a campaign for every region. So whenever you want your ads to change by some item, it could be a time of day, it may be a geographic basis in this case. You need a different campaign so that your governing settings at your campaign level are used separately.
And then your ads fit into your overall campaign settings. So, if you want ads that are Washington car insurance, to show to people in Washington, and Texas car insurance, to show to people in Texas. And Pennsylvania insurance, so it'll be in Pennsylvania, and so forth, may be lots of geographies.
You need a campaign for each of these geographies, assuming you're using keywords such as just car insurance. Now, if all your keywords had geographic modifiers on them, so your keywords were Washington car insurance, Texas car insurance, Pennsylvania car insurance. You could then just make an ad group for each of the geographies in one national campaign.
So, the big difference when we need different campaigns by region is all your keywords geographically qualified. If they are, then you can put them on one campaign. If they're not and you want to find users who just type in car insurance in Chicago, and then show an ad that shows Chicago car insurance.
Then you need a campaign targeted just to Chicago region. Those times we'll have different budgets by region. Maybe different countries, maybe different cities within a country. If we want different budgets by region, we need different campaigns. So from a country basis this is really common. But even from a metro basis, a city level, or a state level, often you have areas you do really well in, and you want to spend more in those regions because you do really well.
You may have other regions you don't do as well in, but you don't want to ignore them. You want some presence, so you will segment them out, so you can have a different budget in those other areas you're trying to get into, your emerging markets. Now when we look back to our data, we'll often see different CPAs by region.
And so with bid modifiers, we could just set up bid modifiers based upon our CPA differences. Now that's a simplistic way of doing it. A more sophisticated way is to segment out regions based upon your CPAs. So, you may have some high-performing regions. It takes 19 clicks to convert.
You do really well there. And your CPA may be lower, then you have some regions, it takes more clicks to get a conversion. You don't want to ignore the region completely. But you can't always hit your target CPAs there. So you've got a higher CPA for this region.
When you have areas that just, you don't do well in, but you don't want to just abandon the area. You want to keep a presence, so you may segment that out to a third budget, and even a different CPA level. So this is a way of really doing segmentation by budgets and by CPAs on a region basis.

2.7 CPC vs. CPA Bidding

Now, with geographic modifiers you could put them all on one campaign with a bid adjustment. And often, the reason to put it in one campaign versus keep it separate is based upon your bidding style. A cost per click versus, say, a CPA bid method you're using. So, for instance.
When you often combine these regions into one campaign with geographic modifiers, and you're just using manual CPC bidding. It could be enhanced CPC or just manual CPC. Often this works well in hitting your target goals. Because when you see a region that's not performing as well, you can lower the bid modifier.
When you see a region doing really well, you can increase the bid modifier. Now using single campaigns for regions that have highly varying CPAs, when you're doing CPA bidding often doesn't work well. With CPA bidding, you can't use bid modifiers outside of minus 100% don't show your ad.
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So what happens then is you have a campaign that's mixed with good areas and bad areas. Now, with Google CPA bidding, they do some adjustments automatically by CPAs. And conversion rates by region and they'll take advantage of some of the differences. But it's usually not as good as if you just gave the campaign really good input for them to work with and less decisions.
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So, often if you're, if you see widely varying CPAs and conversion rates by region and you're using CPA bidding, it's often best then to bucket regions based upon a performance basis. So geographic segmentation will often, number one looking at the ads, that's number one. If we want different ads by region, different campaigns.
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When we get into budgets, different budgets by regions, different campaigns. When we get into the ads are the same, the budgets don't matter, all that we really care about is our return on ad spent on our CPAs, then often you get into looking at bid modifier usage and bidding method to see if you want to segment them or keep them simplified.

2.8 Mobile Campaigns

And we're advertising not just on desktops, but on mobile devices as well. There are times we may also want to split out campaigns, based upon the purpose of our keywords. So just as a reminder, if you don't want to be on mobile devices, your bid adjustment's minus 100%. That makes your bid zero, whenever it's shown on a mobile device.
If your bid adjustment for a mobile device is anything but zero, then your ads can show on a mobile device. So, when you're advertising on mobile, what are the first things you want to look at is, what is your conversion difference, based upon devices. This will give you an overall bid modifier to start with just based upon the delta for your campaigns.
However, when we get into the keyword themselves, we often see is keywords end up with different CPA's based upon device types. And so,if you just have one overwriting mobile device modifier at the campaign level, you're not really taking advantage of keywords that do better on mobile or keywords that do worse on mobile, you're kind of using a global average.

2.9 Mobile Bidding

So a simplistic way of taking advantage of mobile bid modifiers is to first break out your keywords into, these words we don't even want them on mobile devices, they don't do on mobile, and so our bid adjustment is minus 100%. Then we have these words that do amazing on mobile, but don't do very well on desktops, in fact, we wish they wouldn't even be on desktops.
So then we can make a bid adjustment of 300%, the maximum bid adjustments. Then we'll have our other words that they do well on both devices, but they're not exactly equal, so we can put them in another campaign. Then we take that campaign where we have key words with mixed CPAs by devices, and we can break them out into ad group similarities based upon these words are worse on desktops, we have a minus mobile bid adjustment.
And these words are better on on mobile devices than desktops, they're a positive bid adjustment. And these words are about the same, so we'll just use either zero or campaign level bid adjustment for these other words. So, this is a bit more complex, now, you could make this all one campaign and use all ad group modifiers.
Then you're really watching your keywords well, and you often want to, then, label your ad groups differently, like this ad group name dash no mobile and those no mobile ad groups are always minus 100%, or use labels for the labeling. No mobile, and these, great mobile, so they are always plus 300% ad groups, and then the rest can just be modifiers.
So you can go to a complex level ,a breaking down your bid adjustments by campaigns first, and that's easy then just to segment these words aren't on mobile, these are really good on mobile, these we just examine delta's for bid modifiers. Or if you want less campaigns, and that's often that's for budgetary reasons not to separate your budget everywhere, although you can use shared budgets so they can all use one budget.
You could put them all in one campaign, and just watch your ad group modifiers closely.

2.10 Growing Campaign Complexity

Now this is also where we have to start thinking about the sheer number of campaigns you're dealing with. Because if you're going to segment on geography, you may have a hundred campaigns already on geography. If you're going to segment by no mobile and mobile better and same by device, so three campaigns by geography.
You took your 100 campaigns and made them 300. So in a case where you're doing geographic segmentation. You're probably going to do more mobile segmentation at the add group level. As you start adding layers and layers of these changes, you're campaign numbers can grow exponentially, so you often choose a main way you're doing your segmentation.
We do geographic segmentation. We're just a national company, we do mobile based segmentation. Or we're going to do ad scheduling segmentation, we'll talk about in just a moment. So often you want to choose a primary segmentation type that you're really going to focus on. If you're trying to keep your campaigns to some reasonable number.

2.11 Ad Scheduling

Now with ad scheduling there's two types. We have a basic level which is just show our ads at these timeframes. It's not normally needed for a campaign level segmentation. Now we can get more complex and we can start looking at our conversion rates by timeframe. And changing our bids automatically by a time frame basis.
And so, in these cases, if we're just dealing with bidding, then we don't really need different campaigns for ad scheduling purposes. However, there are times we may want different ads in a time frame. So, for instance, this is a way that some restaurants are segmented. They have a campaign that just runs on Monday.
So the ad groups say here's our Monday special. This campaign only runs on Tuesday, the ad group ads contain Tuesday specials and here's our Wednesday campaign and that's our Wednesday special ads. So now no matter what day of the week you search, you're going to see an ad with that day in the ad.
Marketing is about connecting with users. So with search marketing, our keyword is our very first connection point. Geography can be a second connection point. A timeframe can be a third one. And in this case, the reason restaurants often use shared budgets weekdays versus weekends, is weekends are often higher average order values.
People order more wine and drinks on the weekends.
>> Now this is a restaurant example. But even if you're advertising services that are both B2B and B2C, you may want different ads running based upon, it's a weekday hour, we want to focus on our B2B ads. Or is it lunch hour, after 5:00 at night or a weekend, we want to focus on our B2C ads.
In that case you may just have two campaigns, one that runs during work hours with B2B ads another one that runs with B2C ads on non-work hours. So when you want different ads by timeframe you need different campaigns for each timeframe.

2.12 Organizing Around Budgets

Now there are other times you want to organize just around product lines or departments within a company. So you may have a company with ten departments. Every department does their own PNL statements. So they all want their own marketing budgets until they each have a campaign, based upon what their budget is.
Well if you get into, say, e-commerce and you sell shirts, and swimsuits, and jackets, and pants and so forth. And of course you have brand campaigns. Then you might organize by product line so that as products go in season or out of season, you can just change your budgets for those product lines based upon how the conversion rates are based upon that time of year.
There are other times you'll want to make awareness campaigns. You'll want to make campaigns that are based around generating more awareness for your company or your brand names. So then you can make another campaign that's awareness campaign, often these are on the display network. They can use budget optimizer or CPM bidding, and then if it's on display, you want to use rich media ads.
But even though when you make these display campaigns and often, their own campaign is best so you give it an awareness budget. Does budgets measured separately than other campaigns which are based upon an ROAS or an ROI target? But whenever you make awareness campaigns, just make sure you're doing holistic measurement of changes to conversion rates and direct traffic, branded queries, even other search ad CTR changes.

2.13 Complex Organization

So you can do really complex organization, you can have really complex goals. The first step is to really list out what you're trying to accomplish. So, for instance, let's say that we're a national insurance company and our goal, first off, is we want to make sure everyone in the country can see our ads.
And, based upon our ROI targets, we want to bid on those numbers for search and then content areas. So, Google Display Network. Now, we look at our information. We find out, wow, we do terrible in Chicago. It's a few percentage points of the population, so there's a lot of customers there, but we're just not doing well.
And the marketing department sat down and brainstormed, and said, well, we're, we're a national company, we can sell B2B and B2C insurance. So, let's see what helps jump start our products and in this region. Let's make some ads that are weekday ads that are B2B focused. Some ads that are weekend focus that are more B2C.
And let's see if any of these ideas can kind of jump start how we're doing in that particular region. Now, we are a national company. We want to make sure we have a search branding campaign. And often a search branding campaign uses fairly generic base keywords, so things like insurance but don't really have an intent of type of insurance to them.
And we want to a highly branded targeted content campaign as well. So this is quite a few different goals going on.

2.14 Think Through Complex Goals

So, when we look at this, we may have a US search campaign. And, of course, this might not be a US search campaign. It may be, here's our 50 geographies, or a hundred geographies that we're advertising in, all broken out in different campaigns. And here's our display. And here's our placement.
So, that standard organization is a good place to start. Then, in our major US campaign, we exclude the region of Chicago. This region is underperforming. We don't want to show our ads in that region because we're going to segment it to try to jump start how we're doing there.
So we make a Chicago campaign. We set up ad scheduling just on week days. The location target of the campaign is just Chicago. We use Chicago of the ad copy. Then we duplicate our keywords. Same keywords, and we're going to use a different offer for the weekends. Talking more about B to C information, and see if any of these ideas jumpstart how we're doing in that region.
And then, finally, we want a search awareness campaign. So this campaign is not being measured on a CPA or return basis. It's being measured on a brand interaction basis. So we may use budget optimizer, you know, focus on clicks, get the most clicks as possible for my budget.
And it's going to use some general keywords. Not keywords that often get conversions, that's our, for our US search campaigns or individual geographic campaigns. And then if you want a highly targeted campaign across the display network we're going to make a placement awareness campaign, we'll take are placements, we may do some topics and some interests as well.
We want highly targeted just placements though. We're going to do CPM bidding. We're going to pay on impression basis which means we'll frequency cap that campaign as well. Then we'll use rich media ads, image and video. So while this is a complex set of goals, it's not that hard to accomplish with your campaigns.
The trick is to first list out what you want to accomplish. What's your budget for each of the goals you're trying to accomplish? Then based upon those goals do your targets differ? So, your targets on a location basis, on a display versus search basis, so forth, to then segment out your campaigns based upon those targets.
So the trick isn't the campaign structure initially, the trick is listing out goals, listing out budgets, determining the main way you're going to segment, mobile, budgets, geography, so forth. And then list out your campaigns, the purpose of the campaign, and their overall targets.

2.15 Insights Drive Organization

To really get into segmenting campaigns is often about finding insights, differences in the data overall. So you can use the segment feature to segment by networks, by clicked types, by devices. You can also go into the dimensions tab and look at your data by geography, hour of day, day of the week, landing pages, placement, so forth.
And what you are trying to find are areas where you're much better or much worse in some sort of insight. Deltas in the data. So you can take advantage of those insights with your targeting methods. And those targeting methods often lead then to multiple campaigns or a different campaign structure.

2.16 Recap

So to recap campaign organization, number one, determine your goals. Number two, determine your budgets. Now, refine your goals and budgets as necessary so these two can work together. Then we start thinking about organizing our campaigns. It's around our goals and our budgets, primary, then our networks. Always segment out display and search.
Then we'll think about the ads, the offer. Do you want different ads or different landing pages by some targeting basis? If you do, then you need different campaigns or targeting methods for those ads and landing pages. Then look at things like conversion rates and CPA differences to see if you want to do some further segmentation.
And then keep looking at your data for outliers, for differences, to see how you can take advantage of that data with your overall structure. So campaigns are really important because they set the targeting methods and the budgets for your ad groups. So by thinking through the ad groups you want a user to show, and what criteria do you want to dictate that that ad can show to someone.
All that criteria is really at the campaign level with locations, and devices, and networks. And so by listing out what you want to accomplish, how you're going to accomplish it, then you can come up with a structure that's going to help you hit your goals within your budgets.